I Can Take it from Here Read online

  JUMP

  Other girls in my neighborhood played with dolls and jumped double dutch. I wanted to kill myself. I spent a lot of time standing at the windows in our sixth-floor apartment. My parents and siblings — if they thought about me at all — probably thought I was looking at the street below.

  Not that there was much to see. Some run-down houses across the street. A couple of small stores selling high-priced junk food to people with no money to spare. A vacant lot filled with drunks — my father included — leaning on cars and talking loudly about nothing. Everywhere, people walked slowly, going nowhere. The view was a little better from my bedroom window, but not by much. I could see the city bus after it turned the corner. At least people seemed to be going somewhere, getting off, going home, catching other buses. I could see another vacant lot. And I could see the second of the three sixteen-story buildings in the public housing complex where we lived.

  I wanted to jump from all those windows.

  For the next nine years, I felt lost, angry, and depressed. I could have run away, but where would I go? Who would believe my story? Outsiders thought we were a godly household. We were, after all, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Every Sunday, we dressed up and walked to the nearby Kingdom Hall, a red-brick single-story building with no windows on 42nd Street in Chicago. There were no wooden pews, just folding chairs set up by teenage volunteers before the meetings. The chairs faced a stage and podium. The disfellowshipped people — former Witnesses hoping to get reinstated — sat in the back and could speak only to the elders. A person could be thrown out of the congregation for several reasons, including disagreeing with the doctrine as put forth by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, smoking, or fornication. The disfellowshipped were outcasts, shunned by family and friends. They lived on the outside, looking in.

  On weekdays we studied the Bible, sometimes in our neighbors’ apartments. We tried to bring as many people as possible into “the Truth.” On Saturday mornings, instead of sleeping late or watching cartoons, we got up early, put on our good clothes (dresses, skirts, and blouses for girls; shirts, ties, and jackets for boys), and met other Witnesses, or “friends,” at Kingdom Hall. The elders assigned us our territories. For hours we knocked on doors, sold or handed out Awake! and Watchtower magazines, and told strangers about Jehovah, Armageddon, and the end of the world.

  At the Kingdom Hall, we got advice on how to “deliver the message” about God’s plan. My mother made us practice what we were going to say. One tactic was to get homeowners or renters to answer yes to every question.

  “You have a name, don’t you?” we asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And everybody that you know has a name, don’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “And people should be called by their name, shouldn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if you can agree that you have a name, and you can agree that everybody you know has a name, and you can agree that people should be called by their name, then why can’t you agree that, if the Bible says that God has a name and His name is Jehovah, everybody should call Him by that name?”

  That was our opening, our foot in the door.

  “Let me show you in the Bible where it says that God’s name is Jehovah,” we said. We pointed to Psalms 83:18 and read, “That men may know that you, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth.”

  The religious tracts we handed strangers asked lots of questions. What are your hopes for the future? Do you just want to live out a few years on earth with the hope of gaining some pleasure and happiness before you die? What hope have you of life after death? What does the future hold for mankind in general? Will some disaster finally destroy the earth and all life on it?

  We had a calling. Each month we turned in a time card tallying the hours we spent in the field, spreading Jehovah’s word. One blustery, snowy day, my mother hauled me outside in field service with her. A man carrying groceries trudged by and said, “Dragging them kids out in this weather.” My mother didn’t respond. But after we passed him, she told me, “I’d rather do this than die like a dog in the street!”

  That’s what she thought would happen to her if she didn’t do what the “elders” and “the Society” — folks gathered in the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in Brooklyn — demanded. Armageddon would come, and Jehovah would kill her like a dog in the street.

  It sure seemed like we were God-fearing folks who simply wanted to help everyone discover “the Truth” before it was too late. We didn’t socialize with worldly people. We didn’t fornicate or hang Christmas stockings or open birthday presents. We were different — better, somehow. And we were good people, right? Especially the mother, who knocked on doors in the snow.

  So why did I want to die while other little girls played with dolls in their bedrooms?

  FRIENDLY GHOSTS

  I cried when my older sisters and brothers left for school. It was 1969. I was three. We hadn’t yet moved into the high-rise on Lake Park Avenue. We lived in a three-story apartment building at 6405 South Ellis Avenue on the South Side of Chicago. We had a porch, a backyard, and a dog named Frisky. Sobbing, I watched my sisters and brothers leave for school. The youngest of six, I had to stay behind. My mother led me away from the living room window and into the dining room. We sat at a table and played school.

  From that point on, we played school every weekday morning. I studied the children’s books my older siblings had tossed aside. I learned the alphabet and how to sound out words phonetically. We had a lot of Dr. Seuss’s books, The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. “The sun…did not…shine,” I read slowly. “So we sat…in the house…all that cold, cold, wet day.” Practice, my mother said. Sound out the words. She was calm, patient, deliberative. She never yelled. My brother Kirk taught me how to spell the word arithmetic. “Just remember the first letters of every word in this sentence,” he said. “A rat in the house may eat the ice cream.” A-R-I-T-H-M-E-T-I-C.

  One day a neighbor’s child stopped by to borrow some sugar. She was eleven or twelve years old. My mother let her in and led her to the kitchen. I sat in the dining room reading. The girl stopped and stared at me. “Is she reading for real?” she asked. When my mother said yes, she burst into tears. My mother comforted her and told her that she, too, could learn to read. She just needed someone to teach her. The little girl left with the sugar, still crying.

  I sucked a bottle until I was three. I drank cold milk like everyone else at home, but I poured mine into a bottle instead of a glass. I always went to sleep with my bottle. Every morning, right after I woke up, I walked into the kitchen and put the empty bottle on the floor. I grabbed the carton of milk from the refrigerator and poured some of it into the bottle. Everyone else drank from cups and glasses. Not me. I walked around with a bottle I had fixed myself. One morning I couldn’t find it. I asked my mother where my bottle was. She and one of my sisters told me that Casper the Friendly Ghost had taken it. Since I liked the Casper show, and watched him every day on TV, I didn’t mind him having it. The cartoon Casper wasn’t scary. He didn’t haunt houses. Mostly he wanted to play and make friends. I stopped drinking from a bottle after that.

  My world changed the day my mother became a Jehovah’s Witness. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table with a man who read the Watchtower magazine with her. He always wore a suit. I remember him smiling. My mother became very serious about life. From that time forward, she was sure the world would end. “Armageddon could start any minute now.” We stopped celebrating Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I had no cake or candles on my fourth birthday. My world got smaller, too. We couldn’t have friends over because they weren’t Witnesses. “Bad associations spoil useful habits,” my mother said, quoting First Corinthians 15:33 from the Bible. She started talking about how Jehovah didn’t like it when we were disobedient. We shouldn’t be “hardheaded” because it was important to have a “good relationship” with Jehovah, she said.

  One morning my mother left home to go to the grocery store. My older sister Cheryl — the same one who told me that Casper took my bottle — was in charge of looking after me. We were all in the playground in the park across the street. Suddenly, I had to pee. I told my sister three times I needed to go.

  “You gotta wait!” she told me. Each time, she turned her back on me to talk with her friends. Finally, I left the playground and headed to our apartment across the street. A big brown dog sat on the building’s front porch. I was afraid it would bite me. I ran across the street to the building, but when the dog turned and looked at me, I ran back. I did that a couple of times. On my third try, a car hit me.

  The blow knocked me unconscious. At the emergency room, a doctor treated my scrapes and bruises and stitched up my head. When I came home, my parents put me in their bed. The woman who struck me came by and gave me a big teddy bear. My mother told her that I was all right.

  When she left, my mother and my sister told me that it was my fault the car hit me because I was hardheaded and disobedient.

  After the accident, a little white girl befriended me. I don’t recall the first time I saw her, and I don’t remember how I learned her name. One day she was simply there, and I was glad. I never believed that she was imaginary or that there was anything odd about her. Her sudden appearance never frightened me. Chrissy became my constant companion for a year.

  One day my mother asked, “Who you talking to?”

  “Chrissy,” I said. I told her about my new friend.

  My mother stared at me. “Chrissy isn’t real,” she said.

  But she was real. Her blond hair, parted in the middle, end
ed in two pigtails. She wore a pink short-sleeved, knee-length dress with white ankle socks. She wore a gold buckle on her black shoes. I liked Chrissy much more than my sisters and brothers for one very good reason: She was always on my side. It didn’t matter that no one else could see or hear her. I could, and she was always there. When my sisters and brothers played together in the backyard, I played and talked with Chrissy in the bedroom I shared with my sisters. I was never alone. When I started kindergarten, she walked with me to school. At the end of the school day, she was waiting for me. She was my one true friend, and she made me feel safer and less alone.

  I was never punished for playing with Chrissy or insisting she was real. But nobody believed me, either. And nobody wondered why I started seeing and talking to a little white girl after I got hit by a car.

  I was glad to have the company. Wadsworth Elementary School, on South Ellis Avenue, was two blocks from home. Along with my sisters and brothers, I had to walk past an abandoned building to get home from school. That building always scared me. A damp, foul air assaulted my nose when we walked by, and my brothers repeatedly told the tale of how one day they were walking by the building with one of their friends and a huge rat ran out, grabbed their friend, and dragged him screaming into the building. They said they never saw their friend again. Curiously, they even told this story to my mother — as if they really believed it. But my mother said that it couldn’t be true, because there were no reports of missing children in the neighborhood.

  One day I walked home by myself. I was fine until I got inside the apartment building. As I walked up the stairs, a man wearing sunglasses approached me from the opposite direction. He asked me if I wanted to go somewhere with him and get some candy. I looked up at him and said, “My mama told me not to go nowhere.” I ran by him and into the apartment. I told my mother what happened, and she ran to the door and looked down the stairs to see if she could find the man who spoke to me. But he was gone. “You did the right thing,” my mother said.

  One night, when I was still four, I started walking in my sleep. Everyone else was asleep. I got out of bed and stood at the dining room table, the same table where my mother and I played school. Still asleep, I thumbed through some books, trying to decide which one I wanted to read. Suddenly the room started filling up with water. I thought I was going to drown. I knew I needed to get out. For some reason I thought I was in a basement — even though we didn’t have a basement. I ran into the kitchen. It had a back door that led down a flight of steps into the backyard we shared with the other tenants. I tried to get out the door, but I couldn’t open the chain. I started screaming, “Let me out!” I banged my fists on the door. Then my mother and my father came into the kitchen and must have woken me up. Slowly, dazed and confused, I realized the water was gone and that I had dreamed it all.

  WIGGLING

  One night, when I was sleeping in my parents’ bed, I felt the sheets moving. I woke up and saw my father lying on top of my mother. I looked at what he was doing to my mother, and then I started doing the same thing to the mattress. I got all sweaty. I climbed out of bed, walked down the hallway, and got a towel to wipe the sweat off my face and neck. Then I climbed back into my parents’ bed. I saw my mother lying on her back, underneath my father, gaping at me, wide-eyed. My father was still doing what he was doing and paying me no attention, so I went back to doing what I had been doing. I had my first climax and went back to sleep. I was three.

  The next morning, I woke up and walked into the kitchen. My mother was cooking on the stove. She looked at me and said, “Lisa, you can’t do everything you see somebody else doing.” I knew exactly what she was talking about. I said, “Okay.” And we never spoke of it again. After that, I masturbated myself to sleep every night. My siblings called it “wiggling.” “Ma, Lisa wiggling again!” they yelled whenever they caught me in the act. My mother would spank me while everybody watched. I would cry and promise not to do it again.

  But it was the only way I fell asleep, so I couldn’t stop.

  THE LAKE MICHIGAN HIGH-RISES

  My father worked briefly as a grocery store security guard. After he lost that job, my mother told him that we needed to live someplace cheaper. In 1971, shortly before I turned five, we moved to 4155 South Lake Park Avenue, a public housing project on the South Side of Chicago.

  We left our dog, Frisky, because we couldn’t keep a dog in the projects. My mother treated Frisky like another child. She cooked his food, usually some kind of beef stew, on the stove. On days when she served us tomato soup and a baloney sandwich, she still cooked for Frisky. Sometimes my sisters and brothers would come home from school and say, “Ooh, Ma, that smells good! What you cooking?” “That’s Frisky’s food,” my mother would say. “Y’all can grab a sandwich.” Frisky didn’t eat dog food, and he didn’t play with other dogs. We left Frisky with one of Daddy’s friends. Daddy rubbed his head and said good-bye. Frisky had been a loyal companion. Every night he slept on the floor by my father’s side of the bed.

  “No one else will cook food for Frisky, so he’ll have to learn how to eat dog food,” my mother said.

  We piled into a truck driven by one of my father’s friends: my father, Townsell, my mother, Annie Jane, and — in order of birth — my sister Cheryl, my brother Townsell, my brother Kirk, my sister Faye, and me, the youngest. It took a few more trips to move all our furniture. My oldest sibling, Annette (Net, for short), was married and living with her husband and two daughters.

  I tried to stay close to my mother during the move, but she kept telling me to stay out of the way. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. My mother seemed overwhelmed by everything that had to be done. I was overwhelmed by the sky-high buildings filled with hundreds of families.

  The Lake Michigan High-Rises, built by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), had another fancy-sounding name — Lakefront Homes. But whenever anyone asked where we lived, we just said “CHA.”

  Constructed in 1962 and completed in 1963, they consisted of three sixteen-story buildings that formed a U-shaped complex located west of Lake Shore Drive, one of Chicago’s busiest expressways.

  Two playgrounds stood between the buildings. The walk to the shores of Lake Michigan took about ten minutes. In winter, the wind whipped between the buildings and the windchill fell below zero. It was cold to the bone.

  Though the buildings were only ten years old, you wouldn’t know it. The smell of urine was everywhere. People stood around watching other people come and go. The elevators were usually broken, which meant a six-flight climb for us. Some parents had to lug their children and their groceries up sixteen flights of stairs. And the stairwells were dark. People were always breaking the bulbs.

  The lights in the elevators didn’t always work, either. When the doors closed, everyone stood in the dark until they opened again. The doors got stuck, too. Trapped inside, we screamed and banged on the door until someone either pried them open or called the fire department. Sometimes they broke on our way back from the Kingdom Hall. We could hear other people in the building laughing at us. “Ah ha, the JEE-hovah Witnesses are stuck in the elevator again.” Eventually, we got out. But the ordeal was always terrifying.

  Ironically, the concrete walkways on each floor were called gangways. The gangways were not enclosed when we moved in. Eventually, city workers covered each floor with metal grating. People said it was to stop the tenants from throwing things — and people — from the building. Several gangs operated in the different projects, including the Gangster Disciples and Black Disciples, the Vice Lords and the El Rukns.

  Sometimes I babysat the two daughters of a young mother, a Jehovah’s Witness who moved from the Lake Michigan High-Rises into another housing project — the notorious Robert Taylor Homes. One evening, after a shopping trip, she got into the elevator. A man got in with her and knifed her repeatedly. He stabbed her in the neck and threw her body down the elevator shaft.

  The next day, after school, I found my mother in the living room, standing at the window, wide-eyed.